"Sure enough, there's some confusion," he tells the Pope. "Clinton's supposed to be down here, and you're supposed to be in Heaven. We'll have this straightened out before you know it."

The Devil enters a few keystrokes and sends the Pope up the long stairway to Heaven. On the way, the Pope runs into Clinton, heading down. They stop to chat.

"How are you, Holy Father?" asks Clinton.

"Oh, I'm wonderful," says the Pope. "I'm so excited. All my life I have waited and longed to meet the Holy Virgin. It's all I ever wanted, to meet the one, the most perfect, the only completely pure and virgin woman in the whole of history."

Clinton looks uncomfortable, clears this throat and straightens his tie.

"Well, Holy Father," he says, "I'm sorry to tell you this, but I'm afraid you're just one day too late."

Jokes matter because they show the culture talking to itself. This joke may hold the key to the question that has been plaguing Republican politicians since Bimbogate erupted. Why, oh why, the pundits wail, why don't the American people care about Bill Clinton's moral failings? How can his approval ratings remain so high in the face of so much sordid scandal?

House Republican whip Tom DeLay moaned at a press breakfast, "Where is the moral outrage?" New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd was driven to speculate,

"Perhaps Clinton is the Devil. It would explain a lot." And a Time/CNN poll taken in March showed that 52 percent of the American public believe Clinton has engaged in a pattern of sexual misconduct while president, and still a whopping 67 percent approve of the way Clinton is handling his job.

He's the bumblebee of American politics. The sucker couldn't fly, but he soars. Why?

Simple wisdom holds that we're willing to let Clinton off the hook because the economy is good. Too simple - that answer misses the truth contained in the joke about Clinton and the Pope. Think about it: there's admiration in that joke. The subtext reads: That silver-haired bastard is so good he could seduce the Virgin Mary herself. It fits with the Rev. Billy Graham's assessment of the situation, when he said, "Clinton can't help it; women just go wild for him."

Here's a shocking thesis. We don't rate Clinton so high in spite of his sexual adventures, but because of them. Secretly, under the Judeo-Christian icing on our moralistic little souls, we like the idea of having a sexually potent ruler. We have president envy. We marvel that with all the stress of his job, he could still have the time or interest for a quickie in the Oval Office. Someone with that much unrestrained libido must be powerful. And morals or no, we worship power.

It's an idea with a lot of historical precedent. In the long ago pagan times, back before Christianity was the law of the land, the sexual potency of the king was connected to the fertility of the land. The seed of the king was understood to make the crops grow. The king's job was to fertilize the queen and whoever else happened to be around, the same way the farmers planted corn in the fields. It must have been a great gig.

With only one small caveat - the king wasn't allowed to grow old. An old, impotent king would be corresponding bad news for the land. So they would kill the king off from time to time, and bring in a new one. Generally, the king would be sacrificed at times of great need, when there was a drought or a famine. Clinton might want to read a warning into this story. When the fate of the land is seen to hinge on your potency, everything is great - as long as everything else goes well.

How much of the old primal leanings still linger under our civilized facade? A lot.

Scrape the surface of a progressive, literate society and you'll find the peasant village mentality still locked in place by our DNA. We're still picking scapegoats, throwing stones at outcasts and following, slack-jawed, in the wake of charismatic leaders who rape, pillage, take the cream of the loot for themselves and throw their followers the bones. We still fear the unknown and the Other; it's just that now we call it Mad Cow Disease, or Saddam Hussein.

And we still want to be saved by the silver-haired knight who acts with such arrogance that we think he must know something we don't. Droit de seigneur, it used to be called. The right of the lord of the manor to enjoy any young woman on his estate. As peasants, we scratched and grinned and watched with envy. And you know what? We still do.

Anyway, who wants a Pope for president? They're two entirely different jobs, with different job descriptions. You want a moral role model? Go to a church, a synagogue or a mosque. The job of president is a job for the trickiest, slickest, wiliest deal maker there is. People who pursue power are, by definition, folks not interested in polishing ethics but in wielding authority.

It's like hiring a lawyer to represent your side, someone to cut deals for you. Do you look for the most moral lawyer you can find, or do you want the most skillful, adept spinmeister available? Would you hire a basketball player to mow your lawn, or a demolition expert to baby-sit your toddler? Of course not. When it comes to home improvement, we know how to hire the proper person for the task. It's only when it comes to the presidency that our sense of appropriateness fails.

You wouldn't expect your plumber to perform the pas de deux from Swan Lake. You'd just be grateful he could unstop your toilet. So what on earth would drive you to search for an ethical role model in the halls of power? It's an exercise doomed to frustration.

Human beings aren't perfect. Presidents are human beings. Therefore, presidents will not be perfect. Never have been, never will be. You're not going to get everything in one package. You're going to have to trade. You can have a colorful, powerful, vivid, imaginative, lustful president who may break the rules and his wife's heart - FDR. Kennedy. Clinton.

Or, you can have an inoffensive, moral, one-term milque-toast. Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George Bush spring to mind.

A perfect person - or even a moral person - would have no desire to wield power over others. Didn't Jesus turn down the offer to enter politics and become a military leader? And a person who has the will to power is going to be flawed in certain ways that might even be predictable, if we could drop our butter cream expectations and do some clear thinking.

Be realistic for one minute. Someone - anyone - wants to be the leader of an entire country, and they're willing to do what's necessary to get there. What do you know about that person? Power turns them on and they have already sold their souls. Think Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Mussolini, Franco, Saddam Hussein, Juan Peron, Marcos. Castro did what he did "for the good of the people," right? And think about what happened then. The President of the United States isn't less powerful than those dictators - he's more powerful. Is that really the role model you want your kids to look up to?

In the immortal words of Douglas Adams, "It is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it...anyone who is capable of getting themselves made president should on no account be allowed to do the job."

The strange thing is, the American people understand this. We really do. We forgave Jefferson his slave mistress, Andrew Jackson his bigamous marriage, Warren Harding his illegitimate son, FDR his betrayal of Eleanor, JFK his philandering and Clinton will be forgiven his bimbos. Size matters - in more ways than one. We understand that the presidency is a big job, for a big man. A man of enormous passion and appetite, who won't be overwhelmed and slink into the shadows. To tackle a country this large, you have to be a little out of control in some way or another.

The only person who doesn't understand this is Kenneth Starr. Ken Starr, whose main character trait is his devout, fundamental religiosity; Ken Starr, who sees himself as the Divine Don Quixote, jousting for the Lord against the windmills of evil. Ken Starr, who is so eager to press his point for the Savior that he's willing to base the entire Lewinsky investigation on illegal recordings, willing, for God's sake, to subpoena both Monica's mother and the list of all of her book purchases for the last two and a half years, willing to struggle on with a $40 million investigation based on alleged perjury in a deposition in a civil case that no longer exists.

Huh?

What are you doing, Ken?

Here's the bottom line.

Clinton and Ken Starr are like the Punch and Judy of the American psyche, playing out this huge morality play. They're the projections we cast up on the movie screens of our own consciences.

We created them in a way, we made them. We put them in power, we keep them there. They are our shadow puppets.

We think we want to be like Ken Starr, with his Colonel Klink glasses and his soft, pursed little mouth. He's moral, right? Upstanding? Doesn't fight, screw, swear, dance, gamble, fraternize, fornicate or invite women to mouth his private parts. Cerebral, self-righteous, linear Ken Starr, who possesses all the sex appeal of a road accident. Our civilized forebrains tell us that Ken Starr is the epitome of the civilized man, the model to which we should all aspire.

The thing is, when it comes right down to it, we loathe Ken Starr. Can't stand him. Even Trent Lott, who is on his side, has been caught on camera wishing that Starr would wrap it up and go home.

We think we should want to be like Ken Starr, but we don't. We really, secretly, want to be like Clinton. Clinton, the silver-tongued sonuvabitch who causes trouble and slips out of it, woos and wins women, plays hard and skates away, sporting an EverReady erection like an ancient fertility statue. A million men in the country are pondering the purchase of Viagra at $10 a pill so they can be just like Clinton. (Bob Dole used it, and Libby Dole loved it.) Per Kathleen Willey's testimony, we happen to know Clinton is one of the few men in America who doesn't need the drug.

You think that potency doesn't affect a man's desire to stray? Robert Kolodny, medical director of the Behavior Medicine Institute in New Canaan, Conn., is warning that Viagra may be a potential troublemaker in marriages, because men whom women knew to be incapable of sex may not be in the market for adultery.

"The male with newfound prowess may stray from a dysfunctional marriage," Kolodny is quoted as opining in USA Today. "Or at least the possibility may make many wives quite nervous."

In other words, this reputable sex expert believes that the only reason many men don't act like Clinton is because they can't. Give them a new erection - Clinton size - and they may very well take it for a spin around town, like a new Corvette.

The Clinton-Starr pro-wrestling match is so compelling because it shines the hot pink spotlight on an uncomfortable fissure in the American soul when it comes to sex. Each of us carries those two characters inside us: the prissy moralizer and the unrepentant playboy. The two voices, locked in permanent struggle, come up with a different result from day to day and person to person - first one wins, and then the other.

Example Number One: In the same March Time/CNN poll, 68 percent of Americans said that they still approved of Clinton despite the allegations because, "The President is a human being, with all the temptations the rest of us have." And 40 percent admitted, with an admirable gap of the gray areas of human morality, that, "While lying is seldom acceptable, lying about sex is something that most of us do."

Example Number Two: In a study performed by social scientists in Chicago and London comparing the sexual behavior of Americans and Brits, researchers found that while Americans tend to exhibit more extreme behaviors than people in Great Britain, including multiple partners and extramarital affairs, significantly more Americans feel that such activity is "always wrong," or

"almost always wrong."

Are you following this? We do it more than they do, and then feel worse about it. We are both more obsessed and more repressed than almost anyone else in the world.

It's an uncomfortable traffic jam on the reproductive freeway, and one that Playboy magazine, with its historical sensitivity to sexual nuance, picked up right away.

As part of an effort to mainstream and attract younger readers, Playboy is considering an ad saluting President Clinton for enabling others to become more comfortable with their own sexuality. There is a print ad under development that features a picture of the White House with the headline, "The Revolution isn't over. It's just beginning." The tagline reads, "Life, liberty and the pursuit of fantasy."

Is it wrong? Is it shocking?

Only if you natter about it with the Ken Starr part of your brain.

We need to jump off the sexual fence we're straddling and move one way or another. If we're going to do it, we shouldn't feel so guilty about it. Consider the French, who find all of our hair-tearing on the subject puerile and silly. When Francois Mitterrand died, both his wife and his mistress attended the state funeral, and no one thought anything about it.

Alternately, if we're really going to cast our lot with our Puritan forebears and judge presidents on the basis of their morality, then we should close down all the sex shops, steamy movies and laboratories that crank out products like Viagra. We should suggest to the scientists that they instead direct their research efforts toward discovering a pill that lessens sex drive, that diminishes erections instead of creating them, that takes away disturbing fantasies, that ensures that a man would never reach for anyone other than his wife.

If we feel strongly that the only good president is a chaste president, let's be up front about it. Let's write it into the job requirement. Let's insist that he take the chemical castration drug while he's in office. Then we can all sleep more soundly at night, secure in the knowledge that the man isn't getting any more action than we are.

And then let's elect Ken Starr in 2000.

The Shann Nix Show can be heard on KGO Newstalk both Saturday and Sunday evenings from 7-10 p.m.&lt;